Utajan's Anvil
by racfwrites
Summary: An alliance of Earth's humans and an ultra-sensitive psionic race known as the Togrun Democracy force their predatory foe into a decisive battle that decides the fate of the war. Oneshot about a very difficult decision I asked a friend to make.


The humans called it 'roaming'. It was a psionic wandering of the mind, a murky telepathy that the Togrun race had developed. In combat, it was a dangerous temptation. In prayer, it helped steel the soul and focus the mind. All other times, it could be regarded as a guilty pleasure, an unspoken means of delivering feelings, social cues - and to the humans, it was the height of rudeness.  
As Commodore-Hato Utajan of the Togrun Democracy listened to the sobering assessment of her fleet's usefulness in the coming engagement, she contemplated it. The Dorbal Warrior Clans' kindred fleets had been rampaging through Togrun voidspace and Human borders alike, and, attracted by an easy kill, were intent on engaging the vastly inferior Togrun fleet. Her fleet.  
She was being asked to do something desperate, and vital, and final. She was especially careful to guard her feelings, lest they bleed into the ambience of the fleet.  
For a long, tempting minute, she contemplated escaping. Contemplated vanishing from this doomsaying counsel to seek oblivion within Eissam's star.  
There was no pleasure in this mental jaunt. She didn't feel particularly guilty, either. She deemed it necessary.  
Quietly, unremarkably, she left her body. She allowed her mind to wander as she stared into the surly, azure hologram of her opposite number in the human fleet. Her mind wandered, tasting, sensing, _feeling_ as it escaped the briefing room and spread outwards like the bow-wake of the human sailing ships of old.  
Her bridge crew, she knew by aura alone. They were serene, confident in her ability to follow the Way.  
She chose her sentiment carefully, tempering it with honesty.

 _Strength will be given to those that still remain._

 _Prepare for battle._

She felt the shiver of anticipation in her officers. She could feel the heat radiating off of them. She knew that back in her physical body, a smile was pulling at the corners of her mouth.  
 _I will not go into the black by myself, at least._  
As her body lingered in the briefing room, she coursed out of the bridge of her aquiline battleship into the starry black, her spirit a speck of hope in that sterile, hostile darkness. Several of her captains, like frightened children, had asked their sightseers to search The Way. Some looked coreward, towards what approached, and far too many looked rimward. Homeward.  
' _We cannot fight such numbers.' 'We do not want to join the darkness.' 'Where are our human cousins?'  
_ She knew she had to say something, to keep them focused before she returned to the briefing.  
She reached out. In that ethereal gloom, her shade took those clutching fingers, kissing the hands and heads of the sightseers and the captains searching for answers, for orders, for hope.

 _Think of the faces you defend._

 _Prepare for battle._

As her words took hold, fear gave way to something strong, yet sweet. Fierce, yet beautiful. She felt the glow-heat of passion as the individual captains spoke with psychic sentiment and spoken word to their crews.

"Commodore-Hato Utajan?" The pale-blue hologram of the Togrun general-majie called her back, his appearance that of an aged humanoid but for the slender, knife-like ears. His mouth opened, slack, realising that the one person that could decide this conflict wasn't truly here.  
The ghost of the terran fleet admiral sighed quietly, working to control his temper as he stood in his deep blue exo-armour.

"Will the human fleet arrive in time to destroy the Dorbalan clan-ships?" Utajan asked suddenly, her eyes still seeming to stare into the middle distance.

"Yes!" The terran fleet admiral started, "They have evaded us thus far due to our superior strength, but if they can be held down in time long enough for us to traverse the wormhole, we will engage, and we will win." He promised, raising a whirring battle-claw in an emphatic gesture.

Utajan held his gaze.

"You are certain?" She asked, her voice dreamlike and brittle.

He saw the look on her face, his expression softening.

"If you can hold them down for seven days, we will win this war. On my honour as a warrior." He promised.

Utajan smiled sadly. "Then we will remain. Move quickly, admiral."

* * *

She walked out of the small part of her office that held the hologram projector, moving on into the wide, opening space of the bridge of her battleship, Nox Aeterna. In the ruddy light of their sigil, a pair of linked, trailing stars, her command crew sat at their clean, grey consoles, patiently waiting for her order. She requested a channel to her fleet, and promptly received it.

"The Combined Dorbal fleet has successfully evaded the combined destroyers of the Togrun people and our Terran cousins. They have moved through our empires like a thief in the night, murdering civilian work crews, science teams, and even invaded the human world of Pothria, to ferry our allies to their nightmare worlds, to work the silos until their spark gutters out. The Combined Dorbal Clans quail at the sight of a fair fight."

"Which is why they are coming to attack us."

"The Togrun fleet has never been numerous. They know this. The Togrun people have never been warlike. That is not our way. They know this as well. When they look at us, they see nervous monks, battle-shy and supine.  
That… has never been further from the truth – and today, on this day of days, is when we'll disabuse them of this notion, even if it costs us our lives.

The human fleet will take seven days to open and traverse the wormhole to this system. In seven days, the hammer falls. Caught between the teeth of our fleets, the Warrior Clans will be bled white, and human and Togrun alike will live in peace for generations, unafraid of their predations.  
"For seven days, we must be a bulwark to our people."

Be silent, be brave, and prepare for battle, my children."

There was no spoken reply from her fleet's captains, or her bridge crew. Words weren't necessary. She blinked back tears and stifled a laugh as the raw emotion stirred by her rhetoric flooded through the fleet and washed through the nexus of her bridge. It was as fierce as fire and as pure as gold.

The gunnery crews of the ships weapon batteries calibrated their launchers, checking and rechecking the armaments, shortening munition fuses to second-guess the enemy fighter screens that would inevitably close with them. The engineering teams readied their envirosuits and tool harnesses, preparing themselves for a job assignment that would never end or be completed. The Togrun boarding teams knelt with their kindred leaders, swearing the souls of their enemies and their own to the Way before taking up their ablative shields and grenade pistols. The coreward edge of the Eissam system burst like a firework as the entire three hundred ships of the Combined Dorbal Clan fleet warped in to crush the Togrun fleet. Their warrior caste ships alone outnumbered the Togrun fleet by two to one, their countless slave ships more than doubling their numbers.

"Corvette crews, fall in behind the ships of the line. Engage on my command." Utajan spoke aloud to the fleet channel. A chorus of affirmatives responded as the wing leaders obeyed, swinging their nimble, birdlike sprint-frigates behind the bulwark of metal that comprised the Togrun destroyers, the cruisers and the battleships.  
The Togrun line opened up their gunports, extended their missile pods and fired everything downrange.

The slave ships were forced to maintain course, goaded on each flank by their shielded, well-armed drivers as the first of the rockets detonated. Hundreds of mutilated slaves of various species died in the first day of the battle, their scratch-built corvettes no match for the wall of nuclear fire that blossomed all around them.  
The slender, dagger-like wings of Dorbal fighter craft that had been escorting the slave wave boosted forward to engage the gunline of the Togrun fleet, firing their laser cannons as they came.  
The Togrun sprint-frigates speared up and over the backs of their battleships, and clashed with the Dorbal fighters head-on.  
 _The fight will be over once their cruisers reach us,_ Utajan decided. _We have to destroy their fighter screen, at least._  
With a flicker of psionic urgency, the order passed down to uncowl the Aegis point defense towers, and the still, black void, already violated by brilliant stabs of red light and fleeting explosions, was suddenly full of streams of tracer fire as hull turrets opened up.  
The Dorbal corvette screen withered under the hail of fire as their ships of the line swept in to support them. For every three cruisers, one of them bore scorch marks and sparking, exposed electronics from the nuclear storm they had weathered from the Togrun lines. Togrun boarding boats buried into the monstrous hulls of Dorbal ships like ticks, disgorging fireteams of psionic warrior kin that smote the defenders with crushing telekinetic fury and explosive munitions.  
As the Dorbal armsmen repelled boarders, their ships opened up their gun ports.  
The Togrun fought like warrior poets, dying without regret and with a prayer on their lips.

The human fleet got its seven days, arriving in time to see the last of the Togrun fleet doggedly harassing the Dorbal ships. By the time the last Togrun destroyer was wrecked, the Dorbal Warrior fleet was a scarred and pitted beast, missing capital ships, its ranks of cruisers and carriers marked with shield-shorted and crippled vessels.  
Without a corvette screen and lacking the freshness of the human vessels, the Dorbal fleet was swiftly and comprehensively defeated.  
With their fleet strength crippled, the Combined Dorbal Clans rapidly lost the war against the Human-Togrun alliance, their slave armies and dwindling heavy infantry outmatched by the exo-armoured and experienced human soldiery and the psionic genius tacticians of the Togrun Democracy. They were promptly forced to abolish their slavery practices and make reparations for the bloodshed inflicted on civilian populaces during the war. After being forced to pay such a heavy toll, the Dorbal Clans fragmented – some displayed the egalitarian interests of their former enemies, whilst the warhawks amongst them simply lost faith in their former comrades, each believing the other families to be at fault for their failure in conquest.  
They never again united to threaten their neighbours.  
After the war, the Terran government helped pay for the replacement of Togrun's fleet, and later sanctioned the renaming of the Eissam system to 'Utajan's Anvil', in honour of the Commodore-Hato that made the victory possible.


End file.
